SBIR-STTR Award

How do primary school children learn fine motor tasks such as printed or cursive handwriting? This project is a research proposal to develop and test a PC-based system that aims at helping teachers to instruct handwriting more efficiently. The teacher can record handwriting, or printing, exercises for the children. The children, who use the system to practice their handwriting or printing, will receive feedback on movement fluency and will receive a reward depending on how well they do. Basing ourselves on the literature, feedback of movement fluency plays a role in improving handwriting and printing. The protocol can be incorporated with conventional handwriting and printing instruction. The following research steps are proposed: The existing movement analysis system will be extended towards a research tool for handwriting and printing instruction. Subsequently, an experimental design will be used to test the effectiveness system. Conventional pre- and posttests will be conducted to determine students' handwriting and printing skills, hand posture, pen or pencil grip, and other variables. Three student classes will be assigned to one of the following 3 experimental conditions: (1) Conventional handwriting and printing instruction, (2) PC-based handwriting and printing instruction, but the key element, feedback of movement fluency, has been disabled, and (3) the PC-based handwriting and printing instruction system that actually measures movement fluency and offers feedback of movement fluency. Progress will be measured by independent raters. We predict that feedback of movement fluency will play an important role in handwriting and printing instruction, thus, will facilitate developing handwriting skills. This project may promote research on how to improve efficiency of handwriting and printing instruction.

Thesaurus Terms:
computer system design /evaluation, learning, printing, psychomotor function, teaching computer assisted instruction, education evaluation /planning, educational resource design /development, elementary school, limb movement, sensorimotor system clinical research, human subject

We will develop a system both for training efficient handwriting in school children and for scientific testing of hypotheses on handwriting education. Handwriting is the only and most widely learned fine motor skill. The US school system spends $200M per year (our estimate) on handwriting instruction materials. Teachers receive only limited training to teach handwriting and the curriculum permits only limited time for handwriting instruction. Yet, little is known how to improve quality and time efficiently of handwriting instruction. To satisfy the demand for scientific support of handwriting instruction, we are developing the "WritAlyzeR" software. This software can work autonomously during the normal lessons of the class. Therefore, the handwriting learning data collected will be more representative than previous automatic handwriting instruction systems where a teacher or experimenter monitors and influences the children. The WritAlyzeR enables researchers to conduct research on handwriting instruction in a very time saving manner. The WritAlyzeR, in combination with our existing MovAlyzeR will form a powerful research tool to test many hypotheses on improving handwriting teaching methods. We will market the WritAlyzeR as a computer-aided instruction system and also provide it as a free extension to all researchers who purchased MovAlyzeR licenses so that many more research groups will be able to find ways to improve handwriting instruction in a concerted effort. This will eventually yield improved handwriting instruction methods for primary school education. The WritAlyzeR uses a simple procedure to teach children handwriting. First the child will see an example of the writing exercise as a real-time movement on the PC display. Subsequently, the student will try to perform the writing movement. The movement will be recorded using a low-cost digitizer made for the educational market for less than $200. A digitizer consists of a small tablet and an electronic pen which enables high-precision (0.01 cm) recording of the position of the pen tip at a high sampling rate (100 Hz), thus accurately capturing movements of the pen tip on and above the tablet. The recorded movement will be processed on the PC and presented on the display in real-time. Color coding of the strokes will show where the child used abnormal forces. In addition, a cumulative fluency score will be presented which increases while the child keeps improving movement fluency. As a reward, the child can play briefly on a novel computer game which requires fluent movements to succeed. In this proposal three of the many possible hypotheses will be tested. Does varying writing size help to obtain optimal hand posture and pen grip and eventually more efficient writing? Does preplanning the target point of each stroke accelerate learning? Does real-time sound feedback during writing indicating dysfluencies help to improve fluency? R44 HD 43576 "Handwriting Teaching Tool" 12/23/2005 5:57 PM Narrative Handwriting instruction is needed to produce efficient and legible handwriting. This will remain important since students lacking handwriting proficiency will be disadvantaged in taking lecture notes or writing exams. Teachers have insufficient training and time to teach handwriting and refer many students to occupational therapists taking away time to treat students with motor control problems. As a consequence, after-school handwriting instruction for children is in demand. Illegible or slow handwriting causes too low grades barring students from continued education. Handwriting re-education is also in demand in health care. Illegible handwriting by physicians causes 10% of the prescriptions to be misread causing preventable medication errors